A View Into The Pipe


There’s a piece over at Daily Kos that repeats some of the Jesus-freaks’ statements on Trump.

Did you ever want some fallback to argue that religion is a form of derangement? I can’t read this stuff without thinking that we’re seeing manifestations of complete madness – but it’s the madness that has always been latent in the mind of the faithful. [kos]

We declare he will be back in office soon. VERY soon. In Jesus’ name. Amen. We pray the fraud in the 2020 election will continue to be exposed and the election decertified in Michigan. The battleground state in our nation. In Jesus’ name.

And just to cover it quickly, because I don’t want to take a lot of time, but it’s coming, out this ‘Truth to Vote,’ where they found all the thousands and thousands of ballot harvesters. You’ve seen that. ‘Truth to Vote.’ But when you see that – that’s coming out in two weeks – when you see those numbers, I think it’s four or five million people cheating. Those numbers are coming out.

Now the press hates like hell to cover it. Oh, they go crazy cause they have a lot of live television. I’m talking about this, they don’t know what to do. They’re saying ‘Should we turn off the cameras?’ Who cares? But right here, just quickly, in Michigan your corrupt state officials sent out 7.7 million unsolicited mail-in ballot applications to everyone on the rolls. Including people who are dead and those who no longer live in the state. Other than that it was wonderful.

It’s like a weirdo version of the Nicene Creed: “I believe these things that are batshit crazy…”

I want to imagine that the Qanon fusion with right-wing christian fascism is going to dead-end spectacularly when they eventually find themselves cornered by reality. They’re still talking about how Trump’s been doing this whole thing as a way of trapping the evil deep state machinators, who will be something something something when the whole plan comes to fruition. Really, this is what comes from America’s coddling of religion and anti-intellectualism: a great tital wave of dipshits.

I’m on a few fascist mailing lists (naturally!) and I get a steady stream of batshit propaganda like this:

It’s not just batshit posturing to raise money from a griftable base. Sure, it’s that, but the griftable base believe in it.

Can anyone look at Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and think “yeah, that’s the radical left”? I wish there was a radical left. The US is just shades of batshit, ranging from “borderline weird but manageable” to “my pillow guy”

Comments

  1. Pierce R. Butler says

    A Democratic victory would not change the world, but it would at least slow the berserk white-trash momentum of the bombs-and-Jesus crowd. Those people have had their way long enough. Not even the Book of Revelation threatens a plague of vengeful yahoos.

    — Hunter S. Thompson, circa 1972

  2. Reginald Selkirk says

    Yes, I am an America First Conservative!
    No, you’ve lost me to the Radical Left.

    Talk about your false dichotomies.

  3. says

    If you can believe that there’s an invisible guy in the sky who will torture you, placing you in constant pain and agony forever because you didn’t follow his rules precisely during your very limited lifetime as a very limited human being, when he’s the one who gave you that very limited brain of yours, well, you’ll believe anything.

    That should not be surprising. After all, many people see religion as a big con, but it can also be viewed as a big conspiracy theory.

  4. says

    And to clarify, one attractive thing about conspiracies is when you believe you have the inside track, because that’s a position of great advantage. Being part of the “group in the know” is a key element of most religions.

  5. crivitz says

    As much as I’d like to see these lunatics eventually finding themselves cornered by reality, as Marcus puts it, it seems to me that if anything like that happens, they’ll just slightly tweak their conspiracy fantasies and continue on basically as before. That’s what those doomsday cultists and jesus freaks do every time they set a date for the second coming or armageddon or the space aliens coming for them or whatever. The date of The Event comes and goes without their predictions coming true, so what do they do? Accepting reality for them is not an option, so they just make whatever changes it takes to maintain the make-believe world they’ve created.

  6. says

    crivitz@#5:
    As much as I’d like to see these lunatics eventually finding themselves cornered by reality, as Marcus puts it, it seems to me that if anything like that happens, they’ll just slightly tweak their conspiracy fantasies and continue on basically as before.

    Yeah.

    Hmm, that gives me a thought: has anyone ever studied how to induce a “crisis of faith”? It doesn’t seem to me that throwing facts at a religion-sufferer is sufficient. There have to be certain tropes and thoughts that are particularly effective. Maybe the “deprogramming” literature is helpful, I wonder.

  7. macallan says

    Yeah, it profoundly weirds me out how barely left of center politicians are called ‘radical’ around here. There’s a mostly sane center-right and wackaloony far-far-far-right party here. Fuck, most democrats would be right at home in Germany’s conservative party.

  8. says

    has anyone ever studied how to induce a “crisis of faith”?

    I don’t know about proper academic studies, but every conversion story I’ve read indicates it comes from self-reflection, perhaps with a little patient help from someone who has already gone through it. Further, they always say that you will never convince such people with logical arguments, no matter how well thought out or presented. The culture reinforces the idea that people from the outside will try to convince you of your errors, but resisting them is a mark of your faith.

    I still remember sitting in church as a kid and hearing the line “Blessed are those who have not seen but who still believe”.

  9. witm says

    I am not sure they have directly studied the ‘moment’, but in broader terms they have. I can’t cite any studies, because I don’t track that sort of thing, but I think Rebecca Watson’s last video covers deprogramming Fox News viewers, so that should cover some element of it.

    Basically, as I understand it, it’s a long term thing. You can’t induce ‘the moment’ directly probably without causing massive trauma and cognitive dissonance. It is a process, because what you need to do is shift the weighting of factors in someone’s brain, and unless you believe in free will there really isn’t a way to do that instantly.

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